Web 2.0 is a term generally used to refer to the concept of a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration and sharing among users. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis and collaborative tagging (also referred to as folksonomies). Consumer focused Web 2.0 sites, such as Flickr.com, Gmail.com, and Facebook.com have brought about a new level of dynamic categorization, classification, and personalization. In these websites, instead of having objects, such as email, music or images, placed into predefined categories, consumers choose words or short phrases (tags) to organize and categorize the data objects. Also, multiple tags can be applied to a data object, which then become public categories which other users can tag. As a community of users grows around a site (social networking), the amount of data available for browsing, as well as the variety of tags (and thus dimensions of classification) for the piece of data increase, making it easier to for a user to find data objects of interest.
The above-mentioned Web 2.0 sites are generally limited to managing consumer, and not enterprise, data. While the enterprise space might benefit from Web 2.0 concepts, the distinct standards and restrictions of enterprise data would hinder the direct reuse of the state of the art implementations of such technology. Unlike consumer data, enterprise data usually must be hosted internally by the enterprise and is subject to rigorous standards of privacy, security, and governance. Also, in state of the art Web 2.0 sites, the hosting site usually has absolute control over the format and type of data that may be classified, which is often restricted to one format. As a result, separate sites are normally used for blogs, images, music, etc. Enterprises, on the other hand, must simultaneously manage heterogeneous data, pulled from a variety of sources and in a variety of formats, in order to make informed business decisions relating to the data.
Another key distinction between the enterprise space and the consumer space is that, in consumer sites, users can benefit from the tags and categories created by other users, but each individual user is generally only interested in the personal use of the information. In enterprises, users need to leverage the classifications of others, and coordinate and communicate with those who have touched or expressed interest in this data. The enterprise model needs to expose the identity of individuals having interest in the information being investigated and also notify those individuals if changes are being made.
Additional requirements in the enterprise space that are not generally found in consumer Web 2.0 models, include manageability and traceability. In enterprise systems tags or user-defined categories need to be treated as objects with an object lifecycle to be managed so that the origins of user-defined categories are identified along with any changes and the source of such changes. This information can be valuable for collaboration purposes, for example to contact users that previously worked with or manipulated a user-defined category. Another difference is that enterprise data is often classified among predefined, as well as user-defined, dimensions, which often must be viewed and navigated in tandem.
Current Web 2.0 systems do not adequately meet the needs of enterprise users. Some sites enable users to define their own personalized categories for a given set of information. For example, in Gmail, a user can label any piece of mail, and define multiple categories for that mail. However, the system is restricted to the format of email, must be hosted by the Gmail site, and the categories used by a user to classify mail cannot be shared by the others involved in the given email. Other sites do allow shareable tagging, such as Flickr, where users tags can be made public, but the user is restricted to the photographic format, and the content must be hosted by the Flickr site itself. Tags, while visible to everyone, are not used as a medium of communication to identify all the parties that are interested in a certain tag.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems and methods that allow the Web 2.0 concepts of user-driven dynamic categorization, classification and personalization to be used with enterprise information assets. There is also a need for systems and methods that enable Web 2.0 concepts to operate within the enterprise requirements of privacy, security and governance.